apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Let me preface this by saying that I am quiet. I don't even own a TV! Yet, in the three weeks that I have been living in my new apartment, my neighbor has asked me to "quiet down" twice! I think she has lost her mind. She complains of "paper thin walls" yet I do not hear a single soul in my building! It is so quiet I have had trouble sleeping. My previous apartment was off of Lincoln in Santa Monica so it's actually quiet weird to not hear traffic.

I don't know what to do about the crazy lady upstairs. She must be laying on the floor trying to listen to me.

My landlord warned me about her when I moved in and said that she is really nosey and will try to get in my business. Maybe this is what she meant.

Laura,

Perhaps you should ask her if it would help if you turned your TV down and see what she says. If she says "yes, please turn your blasted TV down!," then clearly you're well within your rights to IGNORE the craziness. :)

haha, sparkle's idea is brilliant. Some people are just impossible to please.

A semi-crazy shut-in lives below me, but he loves me because I'm quiet as a mouse. Not having a TV helps.

I really lucked out with my neighbors...they're all cool and friendly, and two of them work at a local brewery and keep a keg downstairs. Free beer, all the time. In fact, I think I'll head down and fill a glass right now.

Thanks, the TV idea is great!

I think it's pretty safe to say that she's a little nuts. If I can't hear anyone else then there is no way she could hear me below her.

I think I live in the best building in town: La Biscuiterie Viau, in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. The city is even having an expo about its history and all the neighbours were invited:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/allabouteve/sets/72157602357529292/

It used to be a cookie and candy factory; it's now full of lofts and condos. It was delivered last summer and pretty much all of the owners have moved in. Most are aged between 25 and 45, with a few exceptions. So far, everyone has been super nice and friendly. We give each other rides to Ikea and have cocktails on the shared roof terrasse. We even have a private Facebook group were we rant about the manager and share tips on renovating and decorating! I think the sense of history and pride everyone has in the building, as well as the fact that most people are first-time owners, help form a bond between us.

I'm so happy I get to live here. :)

May I add, the crazy neighbor is much more welcome over the pot smoking loud talker that I had before. Oh and the no working roof thing..

Yay for working roofs!

ugh, you guys are making me sick (with envy). i live in nyc where there is nothing BUT 'neighbors'. I'd be fine if it weren't for the guy who lives right next to me. We share a thin wall. biggest pet peave: I've had to leave numerous notes and bang on the wall to no avail ... he still fails to move his bed from our shared wall when he and his girlfriend are going at it. argh!!! so gross.

I love my neighbors. I moved from a suburb to a semi-bohemian area of the city and I adore it! The only problem are homes or rental units that the owners don't take care of. Nothing like ruining the area's atmosphere for everyone else, eh?

We moved to our current abode specifically to get good neighbors. Our complex is a sort of completely artificial Upper West Side dropped randomly on the edge of downtown, so the tenants self-select in the direction of being quiet environmentalists with leftist-cause t-shirts and large dogs.

It doesn't hurt that all the apartments adjacent to us have the same plan, where it's impossible to put the bed against the shared wall.

i've got one of my good friends and her husband on one side of me and a mean, horrible, nosy, LOUD, screaming, "i conveniently dont speak English when you try to come talk to me about how loud i am" lady and her daughter on the other side of me.

all of our walls are thin, but it's amazing what you'll put up with if you're friends with your neighbors. i can hear every bump and step in my friends' apartment and dont really care. but i write a note and/or bang back every time i can hear the mean lady scream or slam her doors. she drives me crazy!

My a-hole neighbors just threw their annual Halloween/Bass-tastic Halloween party for about a hundred of their college friends until 4am. How you pull that off with a 3 year-old is beyond me. One went to USC & the other UCLA, so I can't even pawn it off on them being typical Trojans.

We rent our house though and they own, so I guess there's a bit of mobility if it really became a problem. Plus our new neighbors on the other side are super-cool (read: they have respect for other people's lives).

Laura, maybe your upstairs neighbor IS hearing a lot of noise, but doesn't hear well enough to tell where it's coming from.... I've known people to mistake next door (and even upstairs) noises for downstairs noises.

I've lucked out with practically soundproof buildings for my current and most recent residences. Also, I lived in my last apartment for 5.5 years, and in all that time I never met a single other resident of the entire complex by name.

Mella DP...is that a good thing or bad thing? Are you in LA?

I've lived in LA, SF and am currently in Manhattan. The thing that drives me nuts about LA is the lack of any real community. Sure, people wave to each other and say 'hello!' and keep walking. But there is a complete lack of any shared connection.

I miss the balance and intimacy of the SF Bay Area. On the whole, I find that people there usually have a genuine curiosity of other people and their cultural lives. I used to live in a building where everyone left their doors open when they got home. That was a sign for others to drop by and bring wine or share their day whenever they felt like it. If the door was closed, that meant they/we were not home or we preferred privacy at the moment. More often than not, most evenings turned into ad-hoc dinner parties. It was wonderful.

Here in NYC, I know most of my neighbors in my building. However, people here usually don't have the space to entertain guests or don't have the time (i.e. not a priority) or it's not part of their culture to have people over. Most people just meet up at a restaurant or bar. Though I know most of my neighbors, there seems to be a line that people are afraid of or don't want to cross over to enjoy a higher level of intimate friendship. That's fine. I just miss the openness of SF and intellectual curiosity of the Bay Area.

Mostly I like my neighbors well enough. We're not close. Current next door neighbor is ridiculous. It has been a solid year of cussings and tossing around furniture in the wee hours. He constantly slams his door, almost never actually locks it (so why slam it?). The wall is thin so I get TMI btw him and his gf who are mostly active when everyone else is quiet.

Upstairs was a 3.5 year annoyance of weekly weightlifting dropped directly on the floor/ceiling. Finally took to banging every time. He hasn't done it at all in at least a month. (A coworker pointed out the neighbor might not have known I was home.)

Other adjacent neighbor is almost impossible to hear. We have a better wall it seems.

I live in LA, in a raw loft downtown, but I've lived in Pasadena, West Hollywood and up Beachwood, and I think community is what you make it. I've always known my neighbors, and while not the social director type, I am pretty outgoing. You just have to work a little harder with some people than others.

But, living and working in the same building isn't like living in a dorm--my photographer neighbor works while I'm asleep, and I'm up at the crack of dawn, when he's just going to bed. And the silkscreener below me is either working or having a fashion show.

But complaining about the movie production on our block binds us all in a shared grievance.

I totally agree with Palmetto's view of LA: community is what you make of it. I've lived all throughout Los Angeles, and I've made efforts to get to know my neighbors, wave hello at people and businesses around the hood, and just be active in helping those who I live next to. I've had more of a sense of real community here in Los Angeles than my time in so called "intellectual" San Francisco (and I really enjoyed my time in SF), but maybe that's because I'm a native and am not expecting LA to be NYC, SF or any other city for that matter. One should experience a city for what it is, not what they want it to be.

It really counts to have something in common with your neighbors, or at least be in the same kind of lifestyle. I moved from a suburb full of parents with young children where I was probably the only one without kids and people moved in and out constantly. Now I live in a more bohemian and eclectic area of the city on a quiet street where I can walk to a coffee shop or the grocery etc. My neighbors are like me, single and no kids. They're great and I love them all!

Although I live in Manhattan, I guess I'm lucky about how my building was built, because it's like the last of the pre-wars, so it's fairly soundproof and all the apartments are fairly large, and my next door neighbor's bedroom is at the other end of his apartment from the wall that my studio apartment shares with his living room.

There's only one person on my floor who is merely "vaguely cordial" whereas as the rest of my floor is out-and-out friendly and yet NONE of them are busy-bodies.

My immediately-above-me neighbor is a fabulous person, and although my immediately-below-me neighbor is said be somewhat less fabulous, she's nice enough to me, so I'm kind of OK. I'm actually surreally fortunate for a New Yorker.

Thomas, LA is really what you make of it. I have lived in NYC, Boston, London, SF, and now Silver Lake, and one of the reasons I never want to leave my current residence is the tremendous sense of community I've experienced. Our neighbors are more than just people to wave at; we make the effort to get to know one another, share dinner, sit outside and watch the sunset, celebrate holidays, help with repairs, house sit, pet sit, etc. etc. Friends from Echo Park and Venice have said the same thing, and I am sure there are other neighborhoods with a similar sense of community. I'm sorry that you experienced a "complete lack of any shared connection" while you lived here, but I can assure you that's not the case for everyone here.